I'll be honest with you. I know very little about Samba. It's my fault for not paying attention. As such here is the plot description.
Samba reunites The Intouchables’ acclaimed directing duo, Olivier Nakache and Eric ...

The original Star Wars Trilogy has been through a lot of changes over the years, starting in 1997 with the release of the Special Editions. The Special Editions allowed George Lucas to tweak here and there and hype up the the...

Despite our circle ranting and raving over Pixels, it seems it's gone largely unnoticed. Ultimately losing out to Ant-Man's $24.7 million with $24 million, Pixels is only in second place. It doesn't really matter since Sandle...

Jul 27 //
Hubert Vigilla
"We're gonna have a TV party tonight! / We're gonna have a TV party all right! / We've got nothing better to do / Than watch TV and have a couple of brews!"
The opening minutes of Repo Man introduce a couple different stories, like you're flipping the channels and every new show is somehow linked to the last. There's the first scene in which a highway cop gets disintegrated by the glowing contents in the trunk of a Chevy Malibu. We then meet Otto (Emilio Estevez), a disaffected LA punk who loses his supermarket job, his girlfriend, and his best friend in the same night. Otto helps a low life named Bud (Harry Dead Stanton) steal a car for $25, which leads to a new gig working as a repo man. We're then back in the desert where the cop got zapped, the area swarming with government agents hot on the trail of the mysterious Malibu.
The film continues in a series of vignettes that reveal their interconnectedness. At first it's visual cues, like recurring pine tree air fresheners, smiley face pins, campaign posters, suspicious G-men, foods and beverages with generic labels (e.g., "Popcorn," "Beer," "Yellow Cling Sliced Peaches"). A lattice of coincidence becomes a series of hilarious contingencies played out like comedy sketches.
Not everything can be explained by the end of Repo Man, but those frayed edges are part of the appeal and what make the movie so rewatchable. In one of the film's most inspired scenes, the wigged-out repo man Miller (Tracey Walter) talks about cosmic coincidences, and how UFOs might actually be time machines. He mentions the inexplicable significance of the phrase "a plate of shrimp" and how that might correspond with something in your head. That "plate of shrimp" he planted in your brain? It comes back later as a sight gag that most people catch only on the second or third viewing of Repo Man.
"I wouldn't be without my TV for a day—or even a minute! / Don't bother to use my brain anymore—there's nothing left in it!"
There's an early scene in Repo Man that's grown in significance each time I've watched it. Following Otto's disenchantment, he's sitting on the railroad tracks drinking. He shouts the lyrics to Black Flag's "TV Party" to combat the silence and loneliness. The song's about the vapid passivity of couch potatoes: we'll have a party where our friends get together and watch TV, because all we care about and talk about is TV, and we barely leave the house anymore. The surf rock score kicks in, and the guitars seem chilly, sad, distant, maybe even self-pitying. The next day, Otto's alone again, shuffling around a shitty neighborhood kicking a empty tin can—trash is the city's tumbleweed. This is what the spiritual desolation of consumer culture looks and feels like. But even still, Otto's better off tuning out of TV land.
TV at its worst is a kind of tranquilizer. It presents a model of the world that's not necessarily the way it is or even the way it ought to be. The aspirations are often conformist because television (again, at its worst) is a vessel for selling people crummy products and crummy lifestyles, and if viewers buy into the pre-packaged normal way of life, they can be controlled and the status quo can continue uncontested. (John Carpenter would explore similar territory in 1988's They Live!)
Otto's pimply friend Kevin (Zander Schloss) can't dream big about life, probably never has. In his introductory scene, he enthusiastically sings a 7-Up jingle to himself. Kevin probably never realized he could dream bigger since success in TV land meant buying into the myth of endless mobility from the very bottom. "There's fuckin' room to move as a fry cook," he says while he and Otto browse the want ads. "I could be manager in two years! King! God!"
"Saturday Night Live! Monday Night Football! Dallas! Jeffersons! Gilligan's Island! Flintstones!"
It's not just disaffected youth burned by TV and its perpetuation of compliance. When Otto returns home to con his folks out of money, he finds them on the couch watching a televangelist. Otto's folks are still decked out as hippies, and they've tuned out of reality. That hope of the 60s? It's been vaporized after political assassinations, murder, and a failure of counterculture idealism; a decade of severe disillusionment (aka the '70s) didn't help. The most that the bummed-out Boomers can aspire to is sending Bibles to El Salvador via the tube. That's why they've given their extra cash to the TV church, including the money that Otto was honestly going to con them out of. (During this scene Otto eats a can of "Food." It's unclear what kind of food "Food" is. Later, Bud buys two four-packs of "Drink.")
This all seems to be part of the California Bummer, which is the reality underlying the California Dream (and really the American Dream). So many people went west in search of fortune during the Gold Rush, fame with the rise of Hollywood, free love with the 60s, good money during the rise of dotcoms. As noted in Penelope Spheeris' LA punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, they wound up west and the air sucked. The dream wasn't the real thing—just a crummy show. The real thing was disappointment, limitation, swindles, outsourcing, burst bubbles, drought. We were sold on The Beach Boys singing "Wouldn't It Be Nice," but what we got was The Beach Boys singing "Kokomo."
So angry teens rebelled and became punks to be part of a community. The LA punks weren't really on the dole or victims of a major economic collapse. Many were middle-class suburbanites who felt weird and were looking for a way to release their aggression. That anger may be rooted in the California Bummer and the dawning knowledge that it's eternal. Life in Reagan's America was perpetual "Kokomo." No wonder LA punk is so nihilistic.
"We've got nothing left to do / Left with no TV, just a couple of brews / What are we gonna talk about? I don't know! / We're gonna miss our favorite shows!"
When Otto takes up with the repo men, it's not just because he can make a quick buck and he can do a bunch of speed. There's an excitement to the gig rather than suburban ennui—"The life of a repo man is always intense!" Hell, it's like playing cowboys in the concrete wild west. There's also a scuzzy community among repo men. There's an ethos, a code, as well. Bud talks it up as Otto does some blow. There's an oath, some do's and don'ts for decorum. Of course, the code gets broken eventually. All codes do.
That was something pointed out in The Dissolve's forum discussion on Repo Man. Everyone in the movie makes some kind of compromise in the end. They sell-out or they sell their principles short, but they seem fine with that because they realize it's all an act and it's just part of getting through life. As Otto's best friend dies, he wants to blame society for what he's become, and wants to elevate his existence as a symbol for the world that's done wrong. "That's bullshit," Otto says. "You're a white suburban punk just like me." His friend has been sufficiently kneecapped for his silly self-aggrandizement, yet he replies, "Yeah, but it still hurts." The truth often does.
But even if it's just a pose, being a shitty punk or a low-life repo man is still better than being normal. (One more time, with feeling: "Ordinary fuckin' people—I hate 'em!") The punks and the repo men know that the TV land version of normal life is bullshit, and that the normal folks buy into it without question. Some of the punks and the repo men know the lives they're living are bullshit as well, but at least they're aware, and they get a little further through the negation or subversion of the compliant normal. That's something that might drive aspirations a little higher; somewhere above the bottom to the lower-middle, a place beyond "Kokomo." Knowing is half the battle, even when you're losing the war.
[embed]219456:42429:0[/embed]
Next Month...
Because we were so late with this Cult Cult, we're doing double duty this week.
Wet Hot American Summer: First Day at Camp comes out on Netflix later this week for your binge-watching enjoyment. Cult Club will look at the film that spawned the Netflix prequel, Wet Hot American Summer (2001).
We'll also be doing a first here at Flixist, expanding beyond our traditional film coverage. Following our look at Wet Hot American Summer on The Cult Club, tune in next week for a review of Netflix's original series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day at Camp.
PREVIOUSLY SHOWING ON THE CULT CLUB
Putney Swope (1969)
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
The Last Dragon (1985)
Tromeo and Juliet (1996)
Samurai Cop (1989)

Jul 24 //
Nick Valdez[embed]219694:42503:0[/embed]
PixelsDirector: Chris ColumbusRated: PG-13Release Date: July 24, 2015
In Pixels, Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler) was a kid who was nearly the Donkey Kong National Champion. After losing the big match against Eddie "Fireblaster" Plant (Peter Dinklage), he resigns to an unfulfilling life of installing televisions for a Best Buy-esque company while his best friend "Chewie" (Kevin James) becomes a down on his luck President of the Untied States. When a probe full of their videogames is seen as an act of war by an alien race, Sam and conspiracy nut Ludlow (Josh Gad) have to step up and save the world from three rounds of pixel fueled shenanigans. Also Lt. Colonel Van Patten (Michelle Monaghan) and her son are there to give Sam something to fight for, I guess.
Pixels may share some troubling similarities with Adam Sandler's recent glut of films (which I'll get to in a minute), but it's also got a faint sense of the good kind of nostalgia. You see, his standard schlub act works well here since the entire film is meant to invoke that 80s "average guy with inane skill becomes big hero" trope. And because it works so well, the rest of the film almost plays out like one of Sandler's early 90s comedies (albeit without the jokes). In terms of overall tone, once the film delves deep into the premise and Sam starts playing against the aliens, Pixels is a lot of healthy fun. Everything's wonderfully simplified. The aliens (who deliver their messages through stock footage of 80s icons) don't have a motive other than to destroy the Earth (or needing a million allowances worth of quarters to do their laundry), the games involved (like Breakout, Centipede, and Pac-Man) aren't filled with complicated rules to weigh the fun down, and the pixelated monsters themselves are gorgeous.
But that's unfortunately where the positive stuff ends.
Pixels may be a reminder of the fun these kinds of movies used to be, but it also reminds you of how much movies have evolved since then. Because Pixels leans so heavily on the past, it can't help but trudge up all of the problematic elements of the era it wants to embody. For example, there are only two women featured in the film and they're treated horribly (which doesn't reflect well on the current perception of gaming culture as a whole). Lt. Colonel Van Patten is meant to be this "strong" female character, and she even gets one well choreographed bit toward the end, but her first introduction is belittled by Sandler's character. After he compliments her looks, he finds her crying as a result of her sudden divorce not two minutes later. And the second character, a videogame heroine named Lady Lisa, is literally a trophy the aliens give the Earth for winning one of the games which one of the characters ends up marrying. She gets no dialogue, and ends up with most mentally unstable of the "Arcaders" Ludlow, the conspiracy nut who lives with his grandmother and worships the character.
The lack of agency just feeds into the old mindset of gamers being older white males with social misgivings. One of the running jokes is these guys are only acknowledged as "the nerds." In this day and age where every literal kid and grandparent is able to play games on some kind of device, it's jarring to go back to hearing such close mindedness. Especially from a film that wants to celebrate these games (going so far as to have Sam explain why arcades were so important, and feature a scene where he decries the current violent nature of videogames). It's totally a "cake and eat it too" situation where Pixels definitely wants to mirror classic films like Ghostbusters, yet have a cynical eye toward the folks who might enjoy themselves while watching. It's that kind of self loathing that brings the whole film down.
There's just so much more to talk about, yet so little time. That's why I was so confused when I initially started writing this review. Even after all of this, I still have idea who Pixels is meant for, nor do I know who to blame for its existence. I can't even say Adam Sandler did a bad job because he actually wasn't his usual self. Lacking his usual lethargic attitude (which he starts off with then hastily has to change out of thanks to some well placed dialogue degrading his love of shorts), Sandler's never been more physical. There's also a lack of the standard poop and fart jokes you'd expect because the film's not really for kids (there's no way they'd appreciate seeing Paperboy and Joust sprites on the same screen).
Oh right, I guess I should mention there were zero jokes that appealed to me. While there is fun in the way sequences are set up, none of the fun is stemmed from the dialogue. Also, I saw in 3D and would definitely recommend seeing the pixelated monsters in that fashion. Then again, maybe you should avoid this altogether so you don't end up feeling the same confusion? I don't know.
Pixels plays so poorly, it doesn't even get to put its initials on the high score screen.

Insert coin to ignoreI really have no idea where to start with this. Usually when I sit down to write a review I'll have an angle by which to tackle a film, but with Pixels, I'm at a loss. I don't really know who the film is for. Is it a comedy a...

Jul 24 //
Matthew Razak[embed]219692:42504:0[/embed]
SouthpawDirector: Antoine FuquaRated: RRelease Date: July 24, 2015
If you've seen any boxing movie you've seen Southpaw. This one picks up in the "boxing movie career timeline" around where Rocky V does, but instead of Rocky we've got Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) as he defends his title once again. However, truly great boxers can't be rich, they have to work from the ground up and so after a tragedy Billy loses all his money, custody of his daughter, and his manager (50 Cent). That means he's got to return to his roots and get a new trainer in the form of Tick Will (Forest Whitaker), who runs a boxing center in Hell's Kitchen for poor youths. You literally can find every single aspect of this film in a film that has come before it. There is not an original concept going for it in terms of story.
There's even less going for it in terms of pacing. The screenplay is horrendously light on tension building and this means that by the time the final fight has rolled in you don't feel like you should be there. The conflict between Gyllenhaal and his opponent is so lightly touched on and poorly handled that the guy just becomes a punching bag. Even the sports training montages feel like they're rushed and disconnected. At no point does the movie build successfully in emotion, leaving its talented actors and director with little to grab the viewer with.
They all try, though. The cast is obviously fantastic and without them the film would be utterly boring. We've seen it all before and we've seen it done better so it's a good thing the actors turn redundancy into something slightly original. Gyllenhaal, who must have had a sculptor chisel his abs for the film, seems to think he's in a quality movie. His tortured and enraged performance brings back echoes of Stallone's perfectly countenanced delivery in the original Rocky. Whitaker also layers in nuances to a character so cookie cutter you wonder how much the spent at William and Sonoma on him. Tick Will's motivations and character are so awkwardly crammed in that he's barely there yet Whitaker makes his presence known.
Director Antoine Fuqua does as well. While the story may be slapdash and contrived his direction is anything but. Boxing matches are notoriously hard to direct, but Fuqua does a fantastic job of putting his together. His direction is visceral during the matches, sometimes even cutting into first-person -- a risk that pays off thanks to his skill. This move uses its R-rating hard during the matches as they're bloody and powerful. It just can't sustain that feeling throughout, getting bogged down in melodrama too often and forgetting we all came to see a boxer train.
Another sticking point for me was the almost forced use of Eminem's music in the film. He was a producer on the movie, and has a single for the film called "Phenomenal." It plays over a training montage, but just feels awkward. It's angry and loud and out of place. That's really a problem for a lot of the film. There's a lot of sound and fury, but in the end it signifies nothing (to steal from the Bard). You know you've watched some great things, but they sure didn't make a great movie.
Southpaw is a boxing movie made out of other boxing movies and is only buoyed by the fact that its director and actors thought they were in something more. There's not much of an original thought in here, but that doesn't always matter for a sports movie. What does matter is that you get that little thrill in your heart as our underdog hero climbs up from whatever depths he's been flung into. Southpaw doesn't give you that thrill and because of that it can throw a few good punches, but it never lands a KO.

No punchIt's pretty obvious why America loves boxing movies despite the fact that boxing itself is dwindling in popularity. Ever since Rocky the genre has proven that it can easily deliver the best of what we want out of our spo...

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You just read that sentence in Christoph Waltz's voice.
You...

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Jul 17 //
Nick Valdez[embed]219680:42492:0[/embed]
TrainwreckDirector: Judd ApatowRated: RRelease Date: July 17, 2015
In Trainwreck, Amy Townsend (Amy Schumer) is a woman who's just enjoying her life. She's got a good job writing for a magazine and doesn't see the need to get into a monogamous relationship any time soon thanks to her father's (Colin Quinn) teachings ("Can you imagine playing with the same toy the rest of your life?"). One day she's assigned an article about Dr. Aaron Connors (Bill Hader), a sports medicine practicioner who's about to go through an intense surgery. Then through some ups and downs, the two eventually fall for each other. Through the synopsis you can't really gauge why Trainwreck is great, and that's one of the biggest drawbacks. You have to be willing to accept the film's traditional style in order to enjoy its personality. But this film's been about personality from the beginning.
I've seen so many romantic comedies over the years, I've been able to break them down into four main components: quirky girl is an outsider for some reason, quirky girl meets guy who changes her life, random man candy to oggle, and the quirky girl becomes the most important person in the film's world by the end. Unfortunately, Trainwreck has all of these components. It's completely predictable from beginning to end, but the film would rather you enjoy its components rather than the package as a whole. That's not necessarily a bad thing by any means when all of the individual pieces are as well put together as they are here.
As Schumer has proven in the past, she's a comedic dynamo. Couple that with an amazing cast for her to bounce off of, and we've got a romantic comedy more grounded than anything in years past. Her charm just oozes off the screen and effects the rest of the cast. Everyone in the film has such a natural chemistry it makes Apatow's tendency to run his films a bit long all the more bearable. In fact, I wish there was more of her conversations with Brie Larsen as Amy's sister. There are a bunch of scenes between the two where Brie cracks a laugh, and you can tell that it wasn't an intentional one. It's the little things like that which give the film a lot of character. Something that's always hollow in these romantic comedies.
Speaking of chemistry, Schumer and Hader are magnetic. While Hader's character could use more development, Hader fills the role with enough quirk that it elevates it from the material. Schumer's script is amazingly put together too. While there're some jokes that don't work, and Judd Apatow's direction does seep through and you notice a few bits that could've been cut for time (and because they weren't really funny), when the two meet in the middle they knock it out of the park. Like John Cena and Lebron James, for instance. A typical quality of an Apatow directed film are the numerous celebrity cameos from folks you wouldn't usually see in a movie like this. While a bunch of unfunny cameos are here in spades, Cena and James are almost too perfect. As the two fill the conventional "bad bro date" and "quirky guy's best friend," Schumer's writing mixed with their surprising talent completely blindsides. James' acting may be a bit stilted, but he gets the best lines in the film (my personal favorite being a Kanye West riff), and I can't tell you how many times I laughed at John Cena. That guy has a future in comedy. Also, if you wanted to see him naked here's your chance.
Trainwreck is somehow both traditional and unconventional. I don't know how the film managed to find a perfect balance between being an entertaining comedy while still dealing an effective romantic push, but there's so much charm it's easy to write off a lot of the film's technical issues. Normally I'm so jaded with films like these, so I would've torn into how much like other movies it is. But it's not. It's sort of the anti-27 Dresses.
Maybe it's Amy Schumer's persona, or maybe it's how down to Earth it all feels, but when I saw Schumer dancing as a grand romantic gesture at Trainwreck's end (so predictable, I told you), I couldn't help but fall in love with her myself.

John Cena has a great assWhether or not you're a fan of her comedy, Amy Schumer is not going anywhere. Comedy's current "It" girl, Schumer's earned all of the accolades through her comedy specials and often hilarious television show, Inside Amy Schum...

I'm not quite sure I'm all that excited for Pixels. Aside from the nostalgia going there really isn't much driving me to the film. It looks like it could have been done far better by far funnier people, but maybe I'm totally ...

Jul 17 //
Matthew Razak[embed]219677:42491:0[/embed]
Ant-ManDirector: Peyton ReedRelease Date: July 17, 2015 Rated: PG-13
Ant-Man might be the most divergent from the original Marvel comic yet. Instead of focusing on the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), the movie skips over to the modern iteration: Scott Lang (Paul Rudd). As Pym, and his then wife The Wasp, were two founding members of the Avengers in the comics this is kind of a big deal, but it's what you get when you can't roll out a movie based on a shrinking superhero until you've established everything you do is going to be a hit. Marvel has done that and so we get an up-to-date Ant-Man, and Pym's daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), instead of Pym.
That doesn't mean Pym was never Ant-Man nor that there was no Wasp. The movie picks up in the past as Pym quits his superhero heroics for the then new S.H.I.E.L.D. after the death of his wife and vows to hide the technologies that allow him to shrink and control ants. Jump forward to modern day and we find Lang just getting out of prison and unable to find a job so he goes on one more heist... and steals the Ant-Man suit. Meanwhile, Pym has been forced out of the technology company he runs and his predecessor Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) has finally, after years of denial from Pym, discovered how to shrink people. He's built a suit called the Yellowjacket. The only way to stop him from misusing this power? Steal it.
There, my friends, you have a set up for a heist movie, and for the most part this heist works. It's a fun and enjoyable romp highlighted by the great use of Ant-Man's powers throughout. Though his powers cause some of the movie's problems. Any good heist movie is pretty complex, but with Ant-Man's abilities it kind of simplifies things down. The rest of the gang (including T.I. and Michael Peña) seem to be there more for comic relief and to fill a heist movie quota than anything else. The heist itself isn't that clever either as it plays out in a very straight forward manner that you don't see very often in modern heist films. There's no Now You See Me twist coming with this one.
The movie does feature a heavier dose of comedy than other Marvel films. This one is very in line with modern heist films that incorporate a humorous gang into the proceedings to liven things up. Plus, you've got Rudd, who delivers his normal comedic talents to the proceedings. This makes Ant-Man easily the lightest of the Marvel films and probably the funniest, though Guardians is right there with it. The problem with the film's focus on traditional heist film tactics is that it trips into cliche constantly. There's a training montage, and a planning montage and a group of stereotypical teammates. Ironically by differentiating itself from other Marvel films it becomes more generic as a whole.
What's great is that it doesn't especially matter because the fun comes straight from the superpowers. Ant-Man's abilities are so unique in comparison to the rest of the heroes out there that it gives a new spin to things. The action is impressively done and uses the shrinking/growing dynamic in some really awesome ways. The final fight between Ant-Man and Yellowjacket is especially well done as they shrink and grow in and out of a variety of locations. Director Peyton Reed did a really admirable job putting the scenes together with just the right amount of comedy mixed into the fight. I'd still rather see what Edgar Wright could have done (he does get screenwriting credit), but Reed does some very cool things here that turn a very straightforward heist into something awesome.
One of the possible holdovers from Wright's time is just how referential this movie is to the history of heist films. It is often an homage to the classics of the genre. There's a train fight sequence hearkening back to train robbery westerns, a little Mission: Impossible thrown in, some subtle references to Ocean's Eleven and plenty more for those who know their heist movie history. While other Marvel films have given nods to their respective genres, Ant-Man is by far the most meta of them all. I half expected Rudd to pull a Deadpool and talk to the camera at some point.
Sadly, one of the other effects of Wright leaving is that the story isn't as fleshed out as it should be. At points it feels rushed, as a condensed production schedule would make it. This is especially true of the character Hope, who was created specifically for the film, and creates one of the film's most blatant plot holes. She's a trained fighter who knows how to use the suit thanks to her dad, but we can't have her using it because Lang needs to be Ant-Man. They wrote themselves into a corner with the issue and use the excuse that her father doesn't want her using it to make sure she doesn't. It feels even more forced thanks to the first end credit sequence in which (spoilers) her father shows her the Wasp suit he was working on with her mother (end spoilers). One wonders if Wright had been allowed to finish his version if this pretty sexist problem would still be around.
What really works about Ant-Man, and what keeps its problems at bay is that it's small and and practically immaterial. Much like the hero himself, the film is incredibly micro. It, for the most part, ditches the wider Marvel universes and focuses on fun and adventure. It's not the bloated, overwhelming Age of Ultron and its not the completely disconnected Iron Man 3. It's exactly what the MCU needs right now: a creative dose of fun.

Shrinking down the MCUMarvel has a problem on their hands with the MCU. They've got a cohesive style that can make all the Marvel films feel very similar. The way they've attempted to address this is to deliver movies that are stylistically simila...

Update: Looks like some streams got crossed (never cross the streams) and location was wrong. Updated info below.
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